I attended the AIxED in Boston on November 21, 2025

We’re all in this together

Education is currently navigating a period of Future Shock. Institutions, administrators, and faculty are struggling to keep pace with the acceleration of AI technology. Nobody has the complete answer. The policy landscape is lagging behind student and faculty usage. However, this struggle is universal. The overwhelming message from the conference is that we are all on this journey together, learning from each other.

Courseware is about to get interesting

Artificial Intelligence has fundamentally changed the value chain of content. The lecture hall model is fading, replaced by a focus on durable skills—competencies like ethical use, critical thinking, and lifelong learning. The core job as educators is shifting. They are no longer content creators simply delivering facts. They are experienced content designers who craft impactful learning environments. The curriculum must evolve to teach students how to engage with this new, AI-accelerated knowledge.

Higher-ed is lagging behind

The practical adoption of AI is hampered by two key areas: administrative inertia and a lack of specific training. Students and faculty are rapidly using general-purpose tools, often far ahead of administrative policy. To close this gap, there is an urgent need for two things. First, comprehensive teacher training to ensure AI is used intentionally and ethically. Second, the development of pedagogy-first tools that integrate data and design learning experiences (like AI tutors or “guided learning modes”) rather than simply replacing existing systems.

I recently listened to this episode of Decoder with Nilay Patel about how AI is fueling an existential crisis in education, and it really resonated with me. The episode features interviews with teachers who are grappling with fundamental questions about their role and purpose in an AI-driven world.

One quote that particularly struck me:

“That idea that we don’t really understand AI yet, that a lot of people don’t know how it works, and that we have no long-term data about its effects in the classroom because it’s so new, well, that’s a really big point of contention that we heard from a lot of teachers.”

This captures a fundamental problem: we’re making decisions about integrating AI into education without understanding its long-term effects. We don’t have decades of research like we do with other educational interventions. We’re essentially running a massive, uncontrolled experiment on millions of students.

The podcast also highlights how we might be repeating past mistakes:

“It feels to me like we haven’t learned some key lessons, a lot of them very recent. One of those during the pandemic was the costs of unhuman teaching and learning. I worry that as we did with cell phones and over reliance on one-to-one devices, we’re going to wake up a decade or more from now and realize we jumped on a tech bandwagon that keeps kids tethered to screens, harms them and harms learning.”

The pandemic showed us the limits of screen-based learning, yet we’re now pushing AI tutors that would keep students even more tethered to devices.

The most powerful theme from the podcast is the question teachers keep asking: “What are we even doing here? What’s the point?”

When AI can write essays, solve problems, and answer questions, what’s left for human teachers? The answer, I think, is everything that matters most: understanding the student, building relationships, fostering curiosity, teaching critical thinking (not just problem-solving), and helping students to navigate the world as human beings, not just as test-takers.

1EdTech (formerly IMS Global Learning Consortium) develops technical standards that enable interoperability between educational technology systems. These standards ensure that different platforms—learning management systems, content publishers, assessment tools, and student information systems—can communicate and share data seamlessly. This interoperability is crucial for institutions that use multiple edtech tools, as it eliminates data silos and reduces manual workarounds.

Below is a quick reference guide to the key 1EdTech standards, organized by their primary function and data flow patterns.